Articles

Abstract

In the years 1909—1911, Wassily Kandinsky sought to change art — but not simply for the sake of it. He wanted to create art capable of generating a spiritual epiphany in his viewers. To achieve this he strove for both a suitable formal element (abstraction of forms) and spiritual content. It was essential to Kandinsky that the paintings be recognised by his viewers as spiritual. Orientalist subject matter offered him this opportunity. This paper proposes that in a group of five paintings completed during this important period of transition, Kandinsky turned for inspiration to his personal experience of «the Orient’: photographs and sketches from his trip to Tunisia in 1904— 1905 and two exhibitions in Munich in 1909 and 1910. Kandinsky quickly discovered that it was not only the spiritual associations that helped him achieve his objective; the visual material from his trip to Tunisia presented an approach to the dissolution of form. Bodies were veiled and hooded; architecture appeared reduced to flat planes and geometrical shapes. Content and form combined to propel him towards abstraction in a manner not available with any other thematic subject. Postcolonial studies of Orientalist art suggest that it typically involved the implicit or explicit support of an imperial agenda: the domination of «the Orient’ by «the West’. This interpretation oversimplifies what Kandinsky did with his abstract-Orientalist paintings. Kandinsky’s paintings engaged with Orientalist themes, but they were not conventional Orientalist works. Analysis reveals that he rejected as many dominant power structures as he accepted. This complex interplay of acceptance and rejection, or what Homi Bhabha expressed in terms of conflicting desire and derision led to the creation of quintessentially "ambivalent’ images.